Advice on design

[edwin.daniel]

i have a design that I want to get as much advise as I can. I am in an enterprise environment. I have two(2)10K's routers with access to internet and two(2)6500 switch that connects to them.I have almost 100 VLANS running through them.I am running all the things the tools to control broadcast storms such as loop guard; root guard; UDLD; and uplinkfast.My plan is to run splitt my VLANS in half across the switchs and have both switch primary(STP)and secondary(STP)for VLANS and Redunancy. The 10K's run twoHRSP's one for each switchs vlans.Please advise.

[vijayasankar · Accepted solution]

Hi,

It would be nice if you could provide information regarding your setup.

Looks like you want to acheive load balancing as well as redundancy for the vlans carried in your trunk links. If so you can consider using MSTP as the spanning tree protocol in your network.

HTH

-VJ

[edwin.daniel]

We are currently using PVST+ but I would like limit the effects that a broadcast storm will have just in case some switch slip through the defense(NFL season smile!). With the setup as described do you believe MSTP will help? I know 802.1s MSTP will limit the probagation that braodcast storms but what about troubleshooting complexity?

[vijayasankar · Accepted solution]

Hi Edwin,

Running MSTP will be elegant in this situation, as you have more number of vlans involved.

PVST+ is going to have individual STP instance running for every vlan ( 100 ), whereas in MSTP you can just have 2 instances configured, 1 for each core and distribute the vlans between the two MSTP instances. This saves a lot of processor time if has to run individual spanning tree instances for every vlan.

Ofcourse, broadcast storm/flooding can still happen in any vlan, which has to be controlled in other ways as you have mentioned.

You can have broadcast suppression also in place to control the level of broadcast storm, if it happens in your network.

HTH

-VJ